Enterprises (e.g., corporations, partnerships, governments, academic institutions, other organizations, etc.) face continuously increasing risks of malicious attacks waged against their computer networks and assets. The magnitude and complexity of the situation is further increased by the current trend towards BYOD—bring your own device. BYOD environments allow enterprise employees to use their own devices for work purposes, such as, mobile phones, smartphones, tablets, laptops, personal computers, or other electronic devices, in addition to the computer resources provided by the enterprise. However, BYOD scenarios pose inherent security risks because the enterprise typically lacks uniform and full control over each employee-provided device.
Some enterprises have mitigated the risks described above by deploying and maintaining secure networks that limit access to and from outside of the network (e.g., the Internet), as well as, by using virtualized environments that allow enterprise employees to access non-secure resources from within the secure network in a manner that does not impose a risk on the secure network. Techniques for instantiating an application in a virtualized environment are well known in the art. Such an application may be instantiated on a virtualization server and a counterpart remote application may be rendered on a user's computing device.
A common use of application virtualization is to publish hosted web browser applications. An enterprise may have several motives for publishing hosted web browser applications. Among them, an enterprise may publish a web browser to provide enterprise users with access to websites that would otherwise be inaccessible from within the secure network (e.g., websites which require access to the Internet) or websites that have been determined to be typically non-work related or would otherwise pose a security risk to the secure network. For example, a marketing employee may need to access a social media web application for work purposes rather than personal purposes. In another scenario, an enterprise may have implemented a policy that requires a specific type and version of web browser application but an employee (or group of employees) requires access to a website that is not compatible with the enterprise's approved web browser application. Rather than risk security issues by allowing those employees to install an unapproved web browser application, the enterprise may publish hosted web browsers that are of a type and version that is compatible with the required website. For example, an enterprise may require the use of the Internet Explorer® web browser application, manufactured by the Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Washington, and it might not be capable of displaying the content of a webpage that is only compatible with a CHROME web browser application, manufactured by the Google Corporation of Mountain View, Calif.
However, the user experience of using a hosted web browser application to visit a website differs in difficulty and complexity from the user experience of using a local web browser application to perform the same task. In the hosted web browser application scenario, the user needs to install a client application, start the client application, start the hosted web browser application from the client, and then navigate the web browser to the desired website. In addition, the hosted web browser may be of a different type and/or version than the web browser application installed in the user's computing device. Thus, the user must learn how to use multiple types and/or versions of web browser applications.